by Alastair Pearson ’14
Editor-in-Chief
The twelve crinkled pages between your hands have been painstakingly consolidated from hundreds of hours of labor by dozens of skilled staffers and dedicated editors, a team of passionate, professional journalists you should be proud to call your classmates, and whom I have been deeply honored to serve as editor-in-chief.
I do not mean to besmirch their accomplishments when I say that the institution we work for – the Eye – is immensely flawed, nor do I intend to taint the school whose student body we serve when I say that current policy has forced and will force the Eye to exist as a failed caricature in the shadow of its potential self. We are not what you, the students, deserve, and we are not the newspaper that this community’s ideals and the long-term best interests of the school demand.
We are subject to a degree of censorship that, even if almost always exerted through passive means like repeated requests to review submissions or implied refusal to publish, has a seriously detrimental impact on the quality of our paper. Let me be clear that this is not in the day-to-day management of the paper, that we suffer mainly because we feel we cannot pursue certain topics or express certain opinions – so we never try in the first place. Thus we cannot satisfy the student body’s yearning for a publication that actually articulates their diverse and heartfelt views, nor do our reporters have the freedom to seek the answers to stories that strike at the core of what it means to be Ignatian.
In practice, this means that though editions of the Eye do not receive prior review – we do not have to submit a copy of the issue for administrative approval before publication – our most important stories are changed due to interference in the editorial process, weakening editorials or undermining coverage. Our moderators are put in the uncomfortable position where they have to choose between censoring and potentially undermining the Eye, or aggravating their employer.
Our inability to effectively voice the concerns of our student readership was put on full display these past few weeks, when the administration rolled out the new mandatory random drug-testing program and we found our efforts to publish our opinion editor’s anti-drug testing editorial abjectly throttled. Dozens of drafts rattled back and forth between editors and the moderators, but we could not produce any version acceptable to the administration, and even after conceding vital components of the essay it was ultimately discarded because of tone.
If the administration hoped to control the message, it was utterly unsuccessful. The editorial, “A Contemptibly Misguided Attempt at Reform,” by Ben Seeley, was published on Scene Magazine’s website and has since obtained over 1300 likes on Facebook while igniting a firestorm throughout Cleveland. Serious publications like the national magazine Reason covered the editorial, and most focused primarily not on the substance of the work – an excellent, well-reasoned argument consisting of ideas commonly voiced around campus – but on the fact that the students could not have their ideas heard.
Because it is intolerable that students would be denied the basic freedom to discuss an event as obviously newsworthy as the implementation of mandatory, randomized drug-testing, an issue which regardless of personal opinion will affect each and every student at an incredibly individualized level.
Your hair will be tested, the contents of your body scrutinized, your future at stake.. And those students who, like Ben Seeley, maintained the conviction that this is the wrong route for our school to choose – regardless of whether they are right – did not have a representative newspaper to which they could turn and expect publication of a reasonable editorial in a reasonable and timely manner. This, too, is intolerable.
We are a private school, and, as was the case with the debate about drug-testing, our administration can choose to hide behind the veil of legality and assert that the fact that the law affirms the permissiveness of its actions also means that those actions are right.
We can continue to accept a status quo where our conscientious, devoted moderators can be made to feel that their professional success is contingent upon the newspaper toeing the school’s line. We can be intellectually lazy, allowing the newspaper to fall into a state of benign neglect where every page is filled with toothless investigations and vacuous press releases. We are faced with a choice between a newspaper and a newsletter.
That essential distinction rests on whether or not our newspaper faces crippling censorship or whether we affirm freedom of speech, which is in turn dependent on whether students make the decisive editorial choices; not teachers, not administrators.
This year, every article in the Eye has been assigned and edited by students, and I firmly believe this has meant a publication that is both more representative and simply better written, more suited to be the public face of a school as renowned as Saint Ignatius and more ready to change with the times. It has resulted in a system that routinely produces articles like the one written by Ben Seeley, which exemplifies the exact kind of eloquent, cogent, independent thought that a Jesuit education is supposed to develop.
The school funds the Eye, and the administration has used this authority during my tenure to delay Eye articles, which has resulted in those articles missing publication; whether intentionally or not, controversial pieces were not printed. This is informal censorship, just as generally deplorable as any other brand.
What I suggest instead is that the administration recuse themselves from the editorial process in every instance except one in which the most basic foundations of the school are being violated, and that students assume the full powers and responsibility that comes with being vested editorial control. If you want this newspaper to reflect the views of the student body, and be more than a once-monthly administrative pamphlet that happens to be written by students, you will support this proposal. Anything less insults the intelligence of our student body, denies the competence of our editors, and betrays that most foundational of Ignatian tenets: being open to growth. Ideas should not be smothered because they are different.
